"'When I wrote these stories, it was as much a discovery to me as to any reader reading them for the first time,'' she said. ''Things would surprise me. I would sit there laughing and I would say, 'Oh, you're kidding!' It was like people telling me the stories, and I would write them down as fast as I could.''

A selected list of her writing:

The Opposite of Fate: A Book of Musings (Putnam, 2003)

The Bonesetter's Daughter (Putnam, 2000)

The Hundred Secret Senses (Vintage Books, 1995)

The Chinese Siamese Cat (Simon & Schuster, 1994) Read an online version of this children's story